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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Hubble sees both of Saturn's aurorae
Yesterday, the European wing of the Hubble PR machine released this cool image of Saturn and its aurorae, with an associated video.
Hooray! Cassini's tour has been extended for SEVEN MORE YEARS!
NASA has just announced that once Cassini's Equinox Mission runs out in June of this year, they will extend it a further seven more years, long enough for the spacecraft to see Saturn through its solstice!!
Highlights from the January 1, 2010 Cassini imaging data release
The January 1, 2010 Cassini imaging data release includes everything acquired by Cassini from January 1 to March 30, 2009 in all its high-quality glory.
Awesome Cassini mutual event movies
I love posting animations of Cassini images that I compose from frames grabbed from the mission's raw images website, but they are shoddy compared to the versions that eventually come out from the mission's imaging team.
Planetary Society Advent Calendar for December 12: Saturn
Cassini's amazing cameras have set a new standard for the quality, sharpness, resolution, beautiful color, and all-around spectacularness of images returned from the outer solar system.
Saturn's aurora, even better than before
The Cassini imaging team have posted their own processed and captioned version of the Saturn's aurora movie that I posted a preview of about six weeks ago, and it was worth the wait.
Four moons and a ring
Thanks to Mike Malaska for the tip on this one. The image is part of an animation that ends with Rhea transiting Saturn.
Planetary Radio Q and A: Not-so-gassy giants
On Planetary Radio's
Spinning spokes in Saturn's rings
Here's a neat animation captured last month by Cassini and assembled by Mike Malaska: spokes in Saturn's B ring.
Saturn shadows shift with the seasons
So many goodies on the Cassini raw images website lately! I am especially excited when Cassini takes photos through red, green, and blue filters so that it's possible to create views that look roughly like what you'd see with your own eyes.
A brief word on Saturn's radius
I've had two people write in to correct my Phoebe ring post from yesterday.
The Phoebe ring
Last week, planetary astronomers Anne Verbiscer, Michael Skrutskie, and Doug Hamilton published a paper in Nature succinctly titled
OMG! Aurora!
Unmannedspaceflight.com member Astro0 was fiddling around with an interesting-looking sequence of Cassini images when he discovered their purpose -- they were gathered in order to see if Cassini could catch aurorae flaring into being near Saturn's north pole. Cassini sure did!
Cassini RADAR continues to gaze at Titan
The Cassini spacecraft made its 59th flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on Friday, July 24, and in the last few hours we have received images from the RADAR instrument in SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) mode.
Designing the Cassini Tour
Each Titan flyby is not a fork in the road, but rather a Los Angeles style cloverleaf in terms of the dizzying number of possible destinations. So how did our current and future plans for the path of the Cassini spacecraft come to be? That's the question Dave Seal put to me since that's my job -- I am a tour designer.
Canto III: Hints of Equinox
Saturn is rapidly approaching equinox, where the Sun passes through the ring plane (south-to-north, i.e. the northern vernal equinox), and its ring system (i.e. its great now-gloomy poorly-lit circles of large blocks of water ice) is starting to show some really interesting behavior.
Connections
David Seal muses on his time as the mission planner for Cassini, and the history behind its name, and astronomy in Rome.
Welcome to the Solar System, Makemake
The trans-Neptunian object formerly known as 2005 FY9 now has a name:
Saturn, Tethys, and Titan
I thought that today's image release from the Cassini imaging team was exceptionally pretty.